Generous Legislators? A Description of Vote Trading Agreements

Rafael Hortala-Vallve

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2011, vol. 6, issue 2, 179-196

Abstract: Legislators trade influence to attain the approval of their most preferred bills. A classic example can be found in pork barrel politics with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, in which logrolling agreements can load costs onto legislators excluded from winning coalitions. I model the bargaining amongst legislators as a repeated game and show that the outcome depends on the voters' relative valuations toward each bill. Most interestingly, I shed light on a vote trading outcome that has so far been overlooked in the literature; legislators most affected by logrolling agreements (those who bear costs with no benefit) may break such coalitions. Specifically, in equilibrium some legislators "generously" offer their support for bills that are not to their benefit, and obtain nothing in exchange.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00010034 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00010034

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Political Science from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().